Books that inspire me

This books takes an investment and patience with the depth Eisenstein plumbs. It is worth it. I think it is the single most impressive and impactful non-fiction work I've read.

The archetypal spiritual renegade shuns all orthodoxy with a pure commitment to the evergreen truth. Constant learning without homage to knowledge.

Drawing from and knitting together the best of western psychology and eastern wisdom, this is a book I revisit once a year and still have 'a-ha' moments.

An enthralling, uplifting and heart-warming retelling of the Jesus story by a man whose light draws on the Sacred Heart of Jesus as well as on Zen wisdom. A uniter of spiritual traditions.

Some don't seem to take Tolle seriously, but I think this is an intuitive blend of Taoist and Vendantic thought with quite practical guidance.

Here is a man whose moral compass was strong but not brittle, a man who put ego aside to build and lead with finesse a team of inconvenient enemies who could nonetheless best serve the nation.

Jackson often highlights his debt to Eastern wisdom and mindful practice in his personal life and his work building championship dynasties with the Bulls and Lakers.

A brilliant psychological study, and an intriguing metaphor for the dive of the numinous into messy life.

Clears the weeds and gets to the core of understanding. All that is ever happening is [insert your name for Reality] experiencing itself with perfect clarity.

Bangs (eloquently) home the point - you are not the doer. You do not achieve enlightenment. The ultimate understanding includes the realisation that enlightenment doesn't matter.

An insightful take on the divided mind / divided soul. Masculine in its positioning but universal in its applicability.

A beautiful and illuminating tour through the rich and complex forces - historical and all-too-modern - at play in Islam. I learned more from this book than from any other I read in 2017.

From the mouth and the heart of the most revered modern Hindu sage. Self-inquiry and the Jnana path's most powerful voice in Advaita Vedanta.

Steeped in Sufi wisdom, Lessing's brilliant science fiction entertains while managing to challenge socially, politically and spiritually. This is the opener of a five-book series - Canopus in Argos.

Le Guin helps us navigate language and cultural differences, as well as Lao Tzu's humorous and poetic style. Worth it, as the wisdom-to-word ratio is greater here than in any other book.

Watts is unparalleled in deciphering and beautifully re-packaging eastern wisdom for western ears. Although he managed this across numerous paths / traditions, he was, at heart, a Taoist.

LeGuin's science fiction has Taoist themes running throughout. Here, she also brilliantly invites us to see gender roles in a new light.

The fourth and darkest of the Canopus in Argos series. Activists would do well to take from it the strength to help others, to do the right thing, even when the momentum of the times is such as to overwhelm their best efforts.

A more easily digestible book than The Ascent of Humanity, with short thematic chapters and a voice speaking largely (and wisely) to activists.

A humble testimony to the power and potential depth of love. For those of us over-balanced toward the intellectual, this book opens and invites the heart.

A great, modern take on Lao Tzu's classic, aimed at those who fancy themselves leaders and useful to all of us. This landed even more solidly for me than did Le Guin's rendering.

Helps us bring precision and gentleness to our lives, not least to our relationship with ourselves. Helps us face reality, from which we can't really run anyway.

Exposes the folly of seeking security - not only because it is unachievable but also because it is (when we really work it through) thoroughly undesirable!

Helps us parse the words and actions of Jesus from the interpretations that have accreted since his death. Places the birth and early evolution of Chirstianity in historical context and highlights the roles of other key players at the birth of the common era.

A sad, raw, twinkling, aching and ultimately magical true life and death story of Treya Wilber. This book also reveals Ken Wilber's development in this testing period of his life and path.

A Platonic approach to squaring the Relativity - Quantum Dynamics circle. This has contributed more than any other science book to my view of reality. Written for the lay person, but still technical in parts.

An open-eyed account of the place of the activist within larger historical cycles. In degenerative phases, we can only have small, local impact, but that impact is crucial to our and others' humanity.

An example of recasting a story (in this case, evolution since the big bang) on a different footing.

A tour de force, showing the ubiquity and wonder of the emergence of pattern and simplicity from complexity. Our key is self-referentiality, when light is cast back on itself.

Here is a towering 20th century physicist and a man of deep moral conscience. Bohm pursued and embraced precise explanation, hidden order and the creative potential of true dialogue.

This take on the grail legend recounts the human journey, showing the traps that await us, the perils of pride, the role of shadow and the ultimate power of love.

An eye-opening account of the relationships among reason, emotion, sensation and self. These relationships were also central to Gautama's investigation and enlightenment.

An investigator of the interplay of collective and individual mindsets, Jung was open to the reality of unseen forces. Recognising that any human interaction is a product of both actors, he prioritised understanding himself in order to help others.

Half novel, half non-fiction attempt to unite phenomenology and neuroscience in a new theory of consciousness. This was my introduction to the study of subjective experience.

Both post-classical physics and eastern mysticism paint pictures of reality that are outside the realm of everyday sensory experience and our associated terminology and concepts. Capra explores the parallels without citing one field to support the other.

I came to this Le Guin novel (outside the Hainish and Earthsea series) quite late. It's an intriguing angle into the metaphor of reality as a dream (or separate dreams for each person) of the ultimate dreamer. It also illustrates how even the best-intentioned 'over-doing' can be counter-productive.

How did I not come across Hesse earlier in life? Bringing both Jung and Nietzsche into literature, bringing the East to the West, illustrating the suffering of personal growth and the spiritual journey, protesting war as he sat between the two global conflagrations of the twentieth century - he did it all. This is my favourite, but I also recommend Demian, Siddhartha and The Glass Bead Game.

A book my mind wanted to reject but another, deeper part of me was overwhelmed by. Delivered the essence of the path of the heart, a somatic and emotion-led journey from intellectual understanding to lived realisation.

The most impactful book I've read in years. A further immersion in the path of the heart. Combining tantra, psychotherapy, process work. Embracing the shadow to realise life's full sacredness.

Lent argues that we can't help but identify or create and then live largely by patterns. He shows how three macro-patterns developed, critiques the predominant western pattern and presents the attractions of adopting an alternative.